Missing man found floating in his life jacket on Hartwell Lake

Jeff Nichols, left, and his son Will Nichols carry Jeff's kayak while his daughter-in-law Anna Nichols carries Senorita back towards their home on Whitehall Road. Jeff Nichols and Senorita were rescued from Hartwell Lake after they were swept away from shore by an evening storm while riding in the kayak on Monday.

Anna Nichols, left, and her father in law Jeff Nichols show the portion of the kayak where Jeff stowed Senorita, the four-year-old chihuahua at Jeff's feet, after they swept away from shore in a storm on Monday.

Jeff Nichols holds his dog Senorita outside of his home on Whitehall Road in Anderson. Both Nichols and Senorita were rescued from Hartwell Lake after the kayak they were in was swept away from shore in a storm on Monday.

ANDERSON - A life jacket, keen knowledge of lake currents and rescue workers' night-vision equipment helped save a man who was stranded in Hartwell Lake late Monday when his kayak tipped over in a thunderstorm.

Jeff Nichols, a 56-year-old Anderson man, went missing Monday evening when strong winds pushed his kayak out into the lake near the Green Pond landing.

He had been spending time with family when a sudden storm rolled into the area shortly before 9 p.m. as he was trying to return to shore and he was pushed out into deeper waters, said Taylor Jones, deputy chief of the Anderson County Emergency Services Division.

His ocean-style open kayak overturned as the storm grew violent. He spent about four hours in the water.

"I was getting cold," Nichols told the Independent Mail on Tuesday evening. "I started to hallucinate. I was chasing after boats that weren't there."

Jones said family members watched Nichols on the water for about 20 minutes before they lost sight of him and called 911.

Rhett Barwick, a first sergeant with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, said boats initiated a search pattern by about 9:45 p.m. after family lost sight of him and called 911.

Nichols' dog — a five-pound Chihuahua mix named Senorita — was with him in the kayak as he was whisked into deeper waters. When the storm whipped up, Nichols placed Senorita inside the dry compartment of his hollow boat and screwed on the watertight top.

Barwick said the man's son, Will Nichols, was in an 18.5-foot bass boat with a competitive fisherman and was riding near the state search vessel when the older Nichols was found.

The fisherman, Shane Ray, said he was about 400 yards from Nichols when he shut off his motor and happened to hear the man's cries. He guided his boat toward the sound and shined his spotlights on the state vessel to get its attention.

"I kept screaming and screaming for them," the older Nichols said.

Barwick said his vessel was 30 to 50 yards from the kayaker when those aboard saw him, too.

"We all shut our motors off and listened," Barwick said. "With the hand-held spotlight, we lit up where we heard the voice was coming from. We got over there. The son was in a small boat, and he grabbed him."

The younger Nichols said he credits Ray with finding his father. The pair found him within 10 minutes of arriving in the area where his father was last seen. Ray, who lives an hour away in Greer, said he got to Hartwell as soon as he could when the younger Nichols, who works for him at a paint-contracting business, called him Monday night.

Ray said he knew the underwater topography of the site near Flag Island where the older Nichols was last seen. A submerged high spot, invisible from the surface, tends to channel floating objects in a certain direction. He followed that and heard cries. He looked at the clock on his GPS unit and noted the time: 12:06 a.m.

"He knows how the current runs," William Nichols said of Ray. "They need to keep more bass fishermen on call. They listen to fish chopping all the time."

Ray had to put his boat in at Broyles Landing, he said, because the younger Nichols had been ordered not to launch his own search. It took about an hour for the bass boat to reach the search area. The older Nichols said he could see from the water that police boats were searching the islands and shoreline nearby. He gave full credit to Ray for finding him.

A member of the Army 82nd Airborne from 1976 to 1983, Nichols said he'd have been fine overnight on an island.

"We were the only boat shining light on the water," Ray said.

The younger Nichols said his father was exhausted but doing well after the ordeal. His wife, Anna, said she stayed up most of the night talking to her father-in-law. He said he was exhausted and overwhelmed by all the attention on Tuesday.

"That was the worst thing, not knowing if he was dead or alive," she said.

The water was about 80 degrees, Barwick said, and Nichols was lucid when they reached him. He was later taken to AnMed Health Medical Center for observation but is now home.

"We brought him back to Green Pond, and he was more worried about his dog than himself," Barwick said.

The man's kayak had been seen beached on a small island — a treeless 100-yard sandbar known as Flag Island — about 45 minutes earlier, and a sheriff's office team on a dive boat recovered it.

No one knew Senorita was inside.

"We called the sheriff's office on the radio to ask about the dog," Barwick said. "They said there ain't no dog in here."

Deputies hauled the kayak onto the Green Pond dock, Barwick said, and family members came running up.

"The guy kept saying, ‘My dog, my dog, I put it in the hold," Barwick said. "Then one of the deputies unscrewed it, and sure enough, the dog had crawled up to the tip of the kayak."

Barwick said Nichols had about 50 hours of boating experience and did everything right — wearing a life jacket and carrying a whistle with him.

"If he hadn't had the life jacket on, it wouldn't have been a happy ending," Barwick said. "To tread water between Portman Marina and a little island for hours ..."

Jones said the family was distraught as search efforts came up empty for hours, and he said some of their accounts of what happened — down to the color of the kayak — conflicted. At about 11 p.m., he said he told the family that they should consider going home until morning and he offered to have a chaplain drive them.

"They thought we could sleep knowing he was out there?" Anna Nichols said.

The younger Nichols said he felt like searchers had given up on his dad.

"I said they should call a fisherman, and every time I asked, they said get away," the younger Nichols said. "They threatened to lock me up twice."

He said he and family members watched as more and more search lights on the water went out.

"My family was crying," he said. "They kept putting me down. It was pretty bad, but you don't give up on nobody, period."

Taylor said two factors kept the effort going in earnest: every witness said the man wore a life jacket and two rescue-team members thought they had heard a faint screaming early in the search.

The county vessels, Jones said, could not continue without night-search equipment that can see through dark, fog and white caps, and he left the scene about 15 minutes before Nichols was found.

"They gave up, I swear," the younger Nichols said.

Jones had handed over the overnight monitoring of the waters to the Department of Natural Resources, and a helicopter was on standby to be called in for a search at daybreak. With fog and lightning, it wasn't possible to call out the county helicopter before that.

"It's a needle in a haystack," Jones said.

He said rescue-team members, many of whom are volunteers and go through hours of training, find motivation in such happy endings. These are the same people who responded to Fourth of July drownings on Hartwell this year and last and the effort still under way in Oconee County to recover the body of a rafter from the Chattooga River.